“It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added.
It’s crazy how if you’re rich you can just nullify any law or legal precedent to get your way. Elons goings to own infowars now
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
So the problem is that it didn’t maximise the potential income for the bankrupcy case?
Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
The market decided.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The market did not decide, given the bids were secret.
sol@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
“A sale is a sale” works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else’s benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don’t really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.
A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
I assume there are other creditors who didn’t?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
So it’s unfortunately not actually a sale until the judge approves it, it’s just an accepted bid.
Sorta like when buying a car. The salesman tells you the price for the vehicle, overpriced perks, and how much your trade in is worth, and you accept the final price. Then the salesman has to get the floor manager to agree, which they always do, because they’re the ones with authority to approve the sale. Then you can sign the paperwork and exchange money and you’ve actually processed the sale. Until then either party can walk away for any reason.
In this case, it’s like the floor manager rejected the sale because the cash part of the sale price was less than MSRP, and they didn’t think the trade in value mattered.
It’s not common for the sale to get rejected, and it’s even weirder for them to reject “not cash” instead of paying attention to value.
The judge saying the estate can’t accept debt forgiveness in lieu of cash is just odd, since it reduces the debt more than the cash would.
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Follow the money
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s up to the lender to accept the settlement. They’re the ones taking the loss.
danc4498@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Whatever gets the sandy hook families the money they deserve.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They wanted the sale to go to the Onion and not some conservative the group more than the money. They were fully on board with taking the lower amount.